I have wanted to write this post for a long time, but kept forgetting.

The Sanskrit/Pali word samskara/saṅkhāra has some beautiful Russian equivalents that correspond quite closely in terms of word structure and grammatical category.

karman — action, deed, doing; from the root √kṛ, which goes back to the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European root *kʷer- “to do, to make, to create, to accomplish.”

saṃskāra — “co-doing,” “making,” “bringing into being,” “creation.” The prefix sam- is related to the Russian prefix so- and has a similar meaning: togetherness, combination, bringing something together, completing or bringing to fullness. The word can also convey the result of the process: something done, accomplished, created — in a literal word-formational sense.

It is also interesting to trace two more related roots in Russian and English.

The Russian root char- (“charm, enchantment”) is connected by some etymologists with the same Indo-European root *kʷer- “to do, to create,” through the idea of an action that produces an effect (a magical or transformative action). In this perspective, through the development of the meaning “an action that has an effect,” one can see a conceptual closeness to Russian charovanie (“enchantment, charm, magic”): saṃskāra could then be understood as something “enchanted,” “transformed by an act of power,” or the very process of such an enchantment.

This sense of the root was already present in Vedic times, when karman referred primarily to ritual action, ceremony, and sacrifice. It has survived in Indian traditions to the present day: saṃskāras are the important rites of passage in a person’s life — not merely actions, but specifically sacred ritual actions. A “co-doing” in the sense of a transformative sacred act.

In the Latin branch of Indo-European, the same root gave rise to creare — “to create, to bring forth.” In this sense, one possible close rendering of saṃskāra would be “creation,” “formation,” or “that which has been created.”